Customer Satisfaction Survey Template: 7 Ready-to-Use CSAT Templates and Examples

A good customer satisfaction survey template has three parts: one scored question (CSAT, NPS or CES), one open-ended follow-up that asks why, and at most three supporting questions tied to the specific experience you are measuring. That is the whole formula. Below are seven templates built on it that you can copy today, covering the general CSAT check, post-support, post-onboarding, product feedback, client services, NPS and CES, plus the sending rules that keep response rates above 20 percent instead of below 5.

Every question is written out in full, so you can paste a template into whatever tool you use and edit the bracketed parts. If you want the reasoning behind the individual questions, our library of customer satisfaction survey questions covers more than sixty of them by touchpoint.

What should a customer satisfaction survey template include?

A customer satisfaction survey template should include a scored headline question on a consistent scale, one open-ended question asking the reason for the score, and a small number of specific follow-ups about the experience being measured. It should fit on one screen, take under two minutes, and end with a thank-you that tells the customer what happens to their answer. Anything beyond that lowers completion without adding much signal.

Here are the seven templates in this guide at a glance:

Template	Core metric	Send it	Questions
General CSAT	CSAT (1 to 5)	Quarterly or after a milestone	4
Post-support	CSAT + CES	Within an hour of ticket close	4
Post-onboarding	CSAT	7 to 14 days after signup	5
Product feedback	CSAT	After meaningful feature use	4
Client satisfaction (services)	CSAT	At project or quarter end	5
NPS	NPS (0 to 10)	Quarterly, relationship level	2
CES	CES (1 to 7)	Right after a task or resolution	2

1. General customer satisfaction survey template

The workhorse. Use it for a periodic pulse on the overall relationship when no single event triggered the survey.

• Overall, how satisfied are you with [product/company]? (1 = very dissatisfied, 5 = very satisfied)
• What is the main reason for your score? (open text)
• How well does [product] meet your needs? (1 to 5)
• What is one thing we could do to improve your experience? (open text)

Report the score as the percentage of respondents choosing 4 or 5. That percentage is your CSAT, and trending it matters more than any single reading.

2. Post-support CSAT survey template

Send this within an hour of a ticket closing, while the interaction is fresh. It mixes CSAT with a customer effort question, because effort predicts loyalty in support settings better than satisfaction alone.

• How satisfied were you with the support you received today? (1 to 5)
• How easy was it to get your issue resolved? (1 = very difficult, 7 = very easy)
• Was your issue fully resolved? (yes / no / partially)
• Is there anything about this interaction we could have done better? (open text)

If effort scores run low here, the fix is rarely in the survey wording. Our guide to customer effort score software covers how to read and act on CES properly.

3. Post-onboarding survey template

Send 7 to 14 days after signup, once the customer has had a real chance to reach value. This is the survey most SaaS teams skip and the one with the highest leverage, because onboarding friction is the top driver of early churn.

• How satisfied are you with your setup experience so far? (1 to 5)
• Were you able to accomplish what you signed up to do? (yes / not yet / no)
• What almost stopped you during setup? (open text)
• How clear was it what to do first? (1 to 5)
• What would have made your first week easier? (open text)

4. Product feedback survey template

Trigger this after a customer has meaningfully used a specific feature, not on a calendar. Feature-level satisfaction collected in context beats a generic quarterly form.

• How satisfied are you with [feature]? (1 to 5)
• How well does [feature] fit the way you work? (1 to 5)
• What were you trying to accomplish when you used it? (open text)
• If you could change one thing about [feature], what would it be? (open text)

5. Client satisfaction survey template (agencies and services)

For agencies, consultancies and professional services, satisfaction lives at the relationship and deliverable level. Send at the end of a project or each quarter of a retainer.

• Overall, how satisfied are you with our work this [project/quarter]? (1 to 5)
• How satisfied are you with the quality of the deliverables? (1 to 5)
• How satisfied are you with communication and responsiveness? (1 to 5)
• How likely are you to work with us on your next project? (1 to 5)
• What should we do differently next time? (open text)

6. NPS survey template

Two questions. Resist adding more; the follow-up is where the value lives.

• How likely are you to recommend [company] to a friend or colleague? (0 to 10)
• What is the main reason for your score? (open text)

Score it as the percentage of promoters (9 to 10) minus detractors (0 to 6). If you are choosing between running this and a CSAT program, they answer different questions; our comparison of CSAT vs NPS vs CES explains when each fits, and dedicated NPS software handles the scoring and trending for you.

7. CES survey template

Ask immediately after a task: a resolved ticket, a completed setup step, a first import.

• [Company] made it easy for me to handle my issue. (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree)
• What made this harder than it should have been? (open text)

How do I create a customer satisfaction survey?

Start from the decision you need to make, not from a question list. Pick the single experience the decision depends on, choose the matching template above, and edit the bracketed parts to name that experience specifically. Keep one scored question as the headline metric, keep the open-ended why, and cut anything you would not act on. Then pick the trigger: event-based sends (after a ticket, after onboarding, after feature use) consistently outperform calendar blasts on both response rate and usefulness, because the customer knows exactly which experience you are asking about.

How many questions should a customer satisfaction survey have?

Between two and five. Response rates fall sharply with length: a two-question survey routinely completes above 20 percent, while a fifteen-question form struggles to reach 5, and the people who do finish long surveys skew toward the extremes, which biases your score. Every template on this page fits the two-to-five rule. If you genuinely need more depth, run a short survey to everyone and invite a subset of respondents to a longer follow-up instead of front-loading the questions.

When should you send a customer satisfaction survey?

As close to the experience as possible. Post-support surveys go out within an hour of the ticket closing. Onboarding surveys go out once the customer has had time to reach value, usually 7 to 14 days in. Feature surveys trigger on real usage. Relationship-level surveys like NPS run on a quarterly rhythm. The same logic applies to conversational channels: if you handle pre-sales and support questions through an AI chat widget on your site, trigger the satisfaction question right as the conversation ends, when the experience is seconds old and the answer is most honest.

What to do with the responses

The scored questions give you a number to trend. The open-ended answers give you the reasons, and they are the part most teams waste: hundreds of "why" responses sitting unread in an export. Reading them one by one does not scale, and skimming for anecdotes rewards whoever wrote most recently or most angrily.

This is a solvable problem. Survey analysis software clusters open-ended responses into named, counted themes, scores their sentiment, and ties them to what those respondents actually do in your product, so "score dropped this quarter" comes with "and 63 percent of detractor comments name the same billing confusion". If you prefer to run the analysis by hand first, our walkthrough on how to analyze open-ended survey responses covers the manual coding method and where AI takes over.

UserInsight does the whole loop in one place: it fields CSAT, NPS and CES surveys from these exact templates, themes the open-ended answers automatically, and joins every score to product behavior, on aggregate, consented data with no PII, with every theme traced to the verbatim responses behind it.